Image of the Small Intestine

The small intestine connects the stomach and the colon. It includes the duodenum, jejunum, and ileum.

Specialties & Treatments

The treatment or combination of treatments each patient has depends on the stage of the cancer, recommendations of the care team, and the patient’s wishes. These are the most common treatments for small intestine cancer:

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Causes & Risk Factors

Anything that increases your chance of getting a disease is called a risk factor. Having a risk factor does not mean you are sure to get cancer. It means your chances are higher than the average person’s. Talk with your doctor to learn more about your cancer risk.

Laboratory tests: Through testing body tissues, blood, urine, or other substances in the body, your health care team can check to see how the liver and other organs are functioning. They can also look for substances that cells produce when cancer is present.

Ultrasound: This procedure uses high-energy sound waves to create a picture of the internal organs.

Barium swallow: After swallowing a liquid that contains barium, which improves the image quality, health care providers take x-rays to look for anything unusual in the small intestine.

Biopsy: The health care provider removes cell or tissue samples so they can be viewed under a microscope to check for signs of cancer.

Stages of Small Intestine Cancer

Staging is the process that shows whether cancer has spread within or around the small intestine or to other parts of the body. Cancer spreads in the body in three ways: through tissue, the lymph system, or the blood.

Tests and procedures to stage small intestine cancer are usually done at the same time as diagnosis. Staging is usually done to find out how far the cancer has spread, but treatment decisions are not based on stage. Typically, the treatment depends on whether or not the tumor can be removed by surgery.

When cancer spreads from where it started to another part of the body, it is called metastasis. These metastatic cancer cells are the same type of cancer as the primary tumor. For example, if small intestine cancer spreads to the bone, the cancer cells in the bone are actually small intestine cancer cells. The disease is metastatic small intestine cancer, not bone cancer.